Thursday, September 11, 2008

If you've been following the Viktorfeed, you may have noticed that something's been emerging; Tahmid Air (ICAO: THM) had been flying occasionally between Sharjah and Almaty, but since early August it's started to generate more and more movements (the maximum was achieved on the 10th August with 12 flights) to more and more interesting places. Here's a list of their routes:

Interestingly, they've recently stopped being listed with an airline name; just the flight number. So worizzit? The company is registered in Kazakhstan and officially based there - unlike quite a few, we know they occasionally visit the place too. (It's progress of a sort.) There are two Boeing 737s on the register; UN-B3709 recently became UP-B3703, with serial number 22632. It started out working for charter airlines in the UK (Air UK, Thomson) and later Royal Air Maroc and LAN Chile, but then after Air Caribbean things took a turn for the worse. Tahmid got the plane (as EX-212) from MaxAvia of Sharjah, which keen'n'agile minds will remember was one of the rebadged versions of our really old friends, Phoenix Aviation of the UAE, who had been operating it as EX-632 having bought it via another subname, Dolphin Air.

The other, EY-533, serial number 23517, is reported to be on lease from Tajik Air. This particular plane has also seen service with Kam Air as EX-736 (so in the Kyrgyz registry again), leased from something called Eastok Aviation, a Sharjah-based, Bishkek-registered outfit that shut down after being blacklisted in the EU. All the 4 old 737s it bought second hand from Delta ended up at Tajik Air, but this one seems to have gone further.

Whilst we're on the subject; we're seeing some Transaviaexport (TXC) call signs again on the Iraq and Afghanistan routes, and something called "Centrafrique Air Express" (c/s CAE) sent off a flight to Baghdad at 2300GMT yesterday as CAE416; however, it was listed coming straight back from an undisclosed location 15 minutes later. CAE (IATA: 6C) was apparently started in November 2006 in the Central African Republic; it has two planes listed, a 737 (TL-ADR, 21281) ex-Saudi Arabian Airlines, and a 727 (TL-ADY, 21385) they bought off Damascene Airways in Damascus. There's an atmospheric pic here; it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.